Projects

LSFA is not simply a place where lectures are delivered. It is being developed into a dynamic open space where members can come and hang out, use communal facilities and work on creative projects that 1) help them understand the financial sector whilst 2) building useful tools that challenge it. We do adventurous exploration of powerful systems, develop creative, mischievous ways to jam such systems, and experiment with ways to rewire them. In essence, it’s a financial hackerspace.

LSFA is thus not a ‘school’ where people are passive receivers of training, but rather a place for active participants who wish to develop practical or conceptual experiments in financial activism (e.g. shareholder activism / activist hedge funds), arts, (e.g. films, theatre, performance art), anthropology (e.g. ethnographic research projects), education (e.g. immersive tours, phone apps, mapping projects) and alternatives (e.g. alternative currencies / P2P systems / co-operative models). The school will become a site for the beta-testing of alternative forms of economic life.

The aim is thus both educational and practical. People get involved in creative projects as a way to learn about a system they might otherwise feel alienated from or avoid. They subsequently create products, artefacts, processes or installations that the public can interact with too. The school operates on Creative Commons principles, in that outputs from participants can be used as inputs for new projects. The idea is to create a vibrant community with a sense of communal ownerships over the work being produced.